DeepMind and Blizzard to release StarCraft II as an AI research environment

Re:DeepMind and Blizzard to release StarCraft II as an AI re... by kurthr on Friday November 04, 2016 @03:52PM (#12875494)

I think it's really important to realize is that a game AI isn't really there to try to win, or maybe even to "convincingly" beat you the same way a human is. Perhaps you could train an AI to make the game more "fun", but that's pretty hard to measure and people are so different. It's a really hard optimization process.

One commonality, it seems, is that players want to get better at the game. Perhaps, an AI that TEACHES the user to improve their play, and reduce errors would be an easier problem. So far we mostly do this using heuristics of gradually increasing difficulty, but it should really depend on what the player is weakest at... and what the user can improve at fastest! That is something nicely measurable, which you might use to train an AI.

Then, if/when people play against other human players they are as strong as they can be... often an FPS goal.

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Re:DeepMind and Blizzard to release StarCraft II as an AI re... by visarga on Friday November 04, 2016 @04:31PM (#12875833)

> So far we mostly do this using heuristics of gradually increasing difficulty, but it should really depend on what the player is weakest at.

That's how MOOCs should function, too.

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Re:DeepMind and Blizzard to release StarCraft II as an AI re... by oelmekki on Saturday November 05, 2016 @02:47PM (#12881234)

> Perhaps you could train an AI to make the game more "fun"

This is actually a way more interesting problem to solve, for the gaming industry.

Beating games is cool for industries where gaming is not the final problem (autonomous cars, various decision making, etc). But if AIs are to be exploited by gaming industry, it needs to learn things like : "is the user bored?", "what usually triggers new interest?", "how should difficulty be adjusted given current way the user is playing?", etc.

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Re:DeepMind and Blizzard to release StarCraft II as an AI re... by Fang_ on Friday November 04, 2016 @05:56PM (#12876494)

>an AI that TEACHES the user to improve their play

Wouldn't you be able to do mutual training that way? By mutating the AI's "strategy" only after losses, the player would continuously need to figure out a weakness in the AI's game-plan. And the AI tries to evolve its strategy every time it loses.

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Re:DeepMind and Blizzard to release StarCraft II as an AI re... by pizza on Friday November 04, 2016 @05:11PM (#12876155)

You could use some kind of library of example "mistakes" made by very-high-level players to identify when lower-rank players are making similar errors; then point out to the user how everyone else who made that mistake 'updated' their behavior.

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